ABSTRACT
The measures introduced to combat COVID-19 inflicted enormous and predictable harms on the working class and the global poor. How did it become possible for the left, which ostensibly seeks to represent the working class and advance its interests, to think that these measures were acceptable or even desirable? This chapter traces the conditions that made this possible, which go back several decades. First, it argues that, since their embrace of neoliberalism, the left no longer represents working-class citizens and, accordingly, left-wing parties could not grasp the likely consequences of lockdown policies for them. Second, the chapter explores the associated shift in left-wing ideology, from socialism, which saw the working class as the universal subject of politics, to intersectionalism, which views the working class as an object of politics and as one of many vulnerable, oppressed groups in need of state protection. This emphasis on vulnerability and protection, already expressed for many years in a politics of fear and emergency, laid the ideological groundwork for a pro-lockdown stance when the pandemic hit.
